I teach at a member institution of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities. I also happen to be gay. A friend’s early morning text alerted me to announcements from Eastern Mennonite University and Goshen College, both CCCU and Mennonite colleges, that they will add sexual orientation and gender identity to their nondiscrimination hiring statements.

EMU’s nondiscrimination policy will now state: “Eastern Mennonite University does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any legally protected status. As a religious institution, EMU expressly reserves its rights, its understandings of and its commitments to the historic Anabaptist identity and the teachings of Mennonite Church USA, and reserves the legal right to hire and employ individuals who support the values of the university.” The announcement adds that faculty members who are married to same-sex spouses will be hired. A similar announcement was issued by Goshen College.

The announcements surprised me. I had been aware of the vote at the recent Mennonite Church USA conference not to sanction same-sex marriages, so I had anticipated that Mennonite schools would keep the status quo. I was stunned to read about the changes.

Two days before the Supreme Court announced its decision, a group gathered at a Washington restaurant for dinner. Some of us at the dinner currently teach or have taught at CCCU institutions and one was an administrator. Gay alumni of religiously affiliated institutions also attended. We are members of different Christian denominations, and some of us were active in the evangelical organizations, Young Life and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, in former lives. Some have migrated out of conservative Christian churches into faith communities that welcome and affirm LGBTQ persons. We all have different stories but were united that evening in our hope for a good outcome from the court, and, in fact, toasted the court. Imagine ….

The contrast among CCCU institutions regarding human sexuality issues comes at a time when some Christian institutions are mounting a rearguard action regarding the teaching of evolution. At Northwest Nazarene University a professor lost his job because he affirmed that the Christian faith and evolution are compatible. Bryan College “‘clarified’ its statement of faith in ways many faculty members said made the historicity of Adam and Eve so narrow that they could no longer agree with it.” At Bethel College (Ind.) a statement was adopted that states that “Adam was created by an immediate act of God and not by process of evolution.” Faculty may teach other viewpoints, but “are not to advocate for, nor hold leadership positions” in professional organizations that have a different view.

Conservative Christian higher education views on evolution and human sexuality are not unrelated; they are of a piece because these views turn on a literal hermeneutic to interpret the Bible. Christian ethicist David Gushee, in his book Changing Our Mind, has pointed out that fashioning a Christian position on same-sex relations is a “faith/science integration issue.” New evidence emerged about the earth’s origins; new evidence is now emerging about human sexuality that now must be taken into consideration with biblical texts.

Christian higher education has accepted Copernicus and Galileo, however, Darwin remains iffy. Fortunately, institutions don’t burn people at the stake anymore, but they do fire them if they do not interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a literal way. It is perplexing that some Christian colleges that implicitly accept evolution in their STEM programs deploy a different hermeneutic when it comes to interpreting the Bible regarding sexual ethics. Whereas Genesis 1 and 2 are interpreted as a metaphorical account of how the world came into being, these same biblical texts are interpreted literally regarding human sexuality. As Gushee suggests, the creation accounts should not be taken as “scientific self-descriptions.”

Old Testament scholar Peter Enns, in his book The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins, writes, “The most faithful, Christian reading of sacred Scripture is one the recognizes Scripture as a product of times in which it was written and/or the events that took place -- not merely so, but unalterably so …. Unless one simply rejects scientific evidence (as some continue to do), adjustments to the biblical story are always necessary. The only question is what sorts of adjustments best account for the data.” It is not, as some insist, a matter of biblical authority; it is a matter of the interpretive principle one uses -- a literal/historical one or a metaphorical/symbolic one.

The literal interpretation of Scripture and the lack of attention to new evidence about human sexuality have led some Christian universities and colleges to tie themselves into knots when it comes to forming policies on LGBTQ issues. The casuistry is stunning. Take, for example, Hope College, not a CCCU institution, but a college affiliated with the Reformed Church in America (RCA). Shortly after the Supreme Court decision, Hope announced that it would extend benefits to same-sex couples. Many, including myself, rejoiced, however, Hope soon clarified (or made things murkier, depending on one’s point of view) -- no same-sex couple can be married in the Hope chapel because the RCA position is that marriage is to be between a man and a woman (Genesis again). Also, a 2011 Hope statement both affirms that RCA position and states that there will not be a student club that “promote[s] homosexuality.” It is not clear that Hope would hire an openly gay, married person. If that is the case, then benefits will never have to be offered.

One’s eyes begin to cross when trying to make sense of the situations at Baylor and Pepperdine, both affiliates of the CCCU. At Baylor, the phrase “homosexual acts” has been taken out of a student sexual misconduct statement, and the new policy states that “physical sexual intimacy is to be expressed in the context of marital fidelity,” but to know what “marital fidelity” means, one is referred to a 1963 Baptist position paper that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Pepperdine’s law and business schools have officially recognized LGBTQ student groups, which are limited to discussion of LGBTQ issues, networking and professional opportunities. But in 2011, Pepperdine denied official recognition for a LGBTQ undergraduate group that was perceived as an “identity group” rather than a professional networking group. The former did not fit with the Christian mission; professional networking does. I leave it to the reader to decipher the reasons why.

To navigate the tortured terrain of LGBTQ policies at Christian colleges, one must know the difference between sanctioned and unsanctioned student clubs, the difference between support and advocacy (when does a support group for LGBTQ students morph into an unacceptable advocacy group?), and whether a student handbook rule is referenced in a faculty handbook, therefore making the student rule applicable to faculty. What is crystal clear is that some CCCU institutions accept the tuition dollars of LGBTQ students, tell them that they are loved, provide small groups and support groups for them, train RAs to be more sensitive to LGBTQ issues, but will not hire them should they want to work at their alma mater. On commencement day, LGBTQ students are celebrated; the day after they will not be hired because they are openly gay and/or want to have a life partner. No longer at Eastern Mennonite and Goshen.

Christian colleges face a foreboding future. The most obvious challenge is one shared by any private institution -- namely, cost. Gordon College, a CCCU member institution, for example, is facing a $3.8 million budget deficit due to low enrollment. But if Christian higher education is perceived as dyspeptic and anachronistic, then younger millennials, fewer of whom are identifying as religious, will go elsewhere. If conservative boards of trustees, parents, donors and presidents are more concerned about the “brand,” “the optics,” then perhaps lines in the sand will be drawn and some Christian colleges will survive only because they become fortresses against the world.

At that point they will cease to be institutions of free inquiry, no longer universities. The changes at Eastern Mennonite and Goshen give me hope that more Christian colleges will be courageous, grapple with new evidence, hold on to a hermeneutic that is life giving and not life denying, and be prophetic in positions they take. I was moved to tears when I read that the student government at one Christian college passed a resolution asking that sexual orientation be included in the university’s nondiscrimination hiring policy.

Nancy Heisey, professor of biblical studies at Eastern Mennonite, stated of her university's willingness to hire gay and lesbian people in same-sex marriages, “We have a strong commitment to Christian principles, including that justice is central to the Scripture's teaching.” I am reminded of jazz great Sam Cooke’s song “A Change Is Gonna Come.” May other CCCU institutions recognize that to be Christ centered is to be justice centered and decide to be more inclusive and change, as Eastern Mennonite and Goshen have.

The author asked to be anonymous to avoid endangering employment at the college where the author teaches.

San Francisco State bars use of university funds to travel to Indiana. Connecticut governor bars all public colleges (and other state agencies) from using state funds to do so. Do these moves raise academic freedom issues?

Sixty years ago this month, the U.S. Post Office declared a small journal called ONE: The Homosexual Magazine, published in Los Angeles, to be obscene and thus unlawful to distribute through the mail. All copies of the latest issue were seized and presumably destroyed.

The editors -- having already endured a letter-writing campaign from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that tried to get them fired from their day jobs -- cannot have been that surprised by the postal service’s move. Still, the characterization of ONE as “cheap pornography” (in one judge’s words) was ludicrous. Recent issues had included articles on police entrapment, Walt Whitman, and attitudes toward homosexuality in Britain throughout history. The editors also published a sonnet by William Shakespeare and a salute to the “history-making TV appearance [of] Curtis White of Los Angeles [who] personally stated that he is a homosexual.”

By no stretch of the imagination was it fair to call ONE obscene. At worst, it was feisty. But that was much the same thing at a time when “homosexuals were virtually without constitutional rights,” as Walter Frank put it in Law and the Gay Rights Story: The Long Search for Equal Justice in a Divided Democracy (Rutgers University Press). The turning point came when the Supreme Court overruled the USPS ban on ONE in 1958. The decision was little-noticed at the time -- and it doesn’t even register as a blip in the general public’s historical memory, in which the gay rights struggle began, more or less, with Stonewall.

The Supreme Court decision ran to one sentence and cited the Court’s ruling in Roth v. United States, two years earlier. The author of Law and the Gay Rights Struggle is co-chair of the Law and Literature Committee of the New York County Lawyers Association, and takes for granted closer familiarity with Roth v. U.S. than most non-jurists will possess. (I could have told you that the plaintiff was Samuel, a publisher of girlie magazines, and not Phillip, the novelist -- though not much more.) But upon looking up the decision, it’s fairly easy to spot what has to have been the crucial passage with respect to ONE:

“Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest. The portrayal of sex, e.g., in art, literature and scientific works is not itself sufficient reason to deny material the constitutional protection of freedom of speech and press. Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages; it is one of the vital problems of human interest and public concern.”

That it is. And a major strategy of early gay-rights advocates was to insist on the “absorbing interest to mankind through the ages” part with respect to same-sex desire. (Hence the Shakespeare sonnet in ONE.)

Frank’s purview is narrower, and a lot more democratic. He focuses on the seven decades following the end of World War II – a period in which the struggle for equality moved ever more in the direction of grassroots activism and demands for respect in everyday life. Identifying the illustrious gay dead gave way to more mundane but urgent priorities, like securing hospital visitation rights and protection from housing discrimination.

About half of Law and the Gay Rights Story consists of a succinct overview of how gay and lesbian communities and institutions took root within, and against, “a society that had simply decided to place certain people beyond its protection.” In a provocative formulation (I mean that in a good way) Frank writes that “discrimination itself could remain in the closet because gays themselves were not willing to come forward in sufficient numbers or with sufficient energy to contest it.”

A couple of generations of historians have studied how that situation changed – how the numbers and energy accumulated, and began to make a breach in a system that had effectively limited gays and lesbians to two choices, celibacy or criminality. Frank draws on and synthesizes the social and cultural historians’ work without claiming to go beyond it.

He does build in a distinctive periodization, however, by dividing the past few decades of gay-rights struggle into three phases or waves. The first and longest subsumes everything from ONE to Stonewall to the assassination of Harvey Milk: a cycle of growing confidence and assertiveness, coming to an end around the point when reports of a “gay cancer” emerged in 1981. His second period is defined by the AIDS crisis, in which government neglect and anti-gay political sentiment made the gay struggle largely defensive. A third wave, beginning in the early 1990s and continuing through the present, has seen something of a revival of the first period’s vigor but an even more remarkable growth of acceptance of claims for legal equality -- with the Supreme Court defining as unconstitutional both anti-sodomy laws and the Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage to exclude same-sex couples.

In recent years, Frank writes, “concepts of freedom and equality began to overlap in a way they did not in the first phase, when gays were fighting for the right to celebrate themselves without fear and to be allowed some measure of dignity…. The equality that gays have been fighting for in this [most recent] phase concerns all the freedoms that most people take for granted, including the freedom to marry. As that argument has taken hold, the tide of public opinion has shifted, and with it the terrain on which the battle has been fought.”

In other remarks, the author seems perfectly aware of the potential for backlash. Consider the point of view expressed by a voter regarding an anti-gay ballot initiative: "I don't think being gay is right. It's immoral. It's against all religious beliefs. I don't agree with gays at all, but I don't think they should be discriminated against."

Frank cites this arresting blend of sentiments in a context suggesting that it demonstrates a slow growth of tolerance in seemingly inhospitable circumstances. That's one way to look at it. But politics is always a struggle to shift the terrain on which the battle is being fought, and reversals do occur. That said, I'd like to imagine that the person who contributed to ONE under the name Herbert Grant is still alive and well. In 1954, he wrote an article that might well have been the last straw for the authorities. In it, he proposed that same-sex couples be allowed to marry.

If you are gay, like me, or an ally, and work, like me, at a member institution of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), you may have wondered this summer if the bad news about Christian colleges was ever going to end. In June, Eastern Mennonite University’s board announced that it was going to delay a decision whether to change the university’s current hiring practice, which does not permit employees to be in “covenanted same-sex relationships”; however, the board also stated that the current policy is suspended, creating a certain Kafkaesque situation. If a gay person in a “covenanted same-sex relationship” is hired during the suspension, or comes out, and the board decides to not change its current policy, what then?

CCCU member institutions (George Fox University, Simpson University, and Spring Arbor University) asked for and received religious exemptions from the Department of Education’s regulation that transgender students cannot be treated differently under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. A California state judge upheld California Baptist University’s decision to expel a transgender student.

But two letters submitted to President Obama requesting that a religious exemption be included in his then-pending executive order that federal contractors could not discriminate against LGBT employees provoked the most controversy. The first letter, dated June 25, 2014, and organized by the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, had 158 signatures, among them 25 presidents of CCCU member institutions. The second letter was submitted on July 1, 2014, signed by 14, among them Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, a CCCU college.

On July 21, President Obama signed the executive order that added sexual orientation and gender identity to those categories protected by Executive Orders 11478 and 11246. The order does not include the requested religious exemption — only time will tell what litigation this omission will spark. I suspect the Alliance Defending Freedom is ready and waiting for the first CCCU college to knock on its door for legal help to keep LGBT persons at bay.

Others have written about the legal issues raised by this executive order for CCCU colleges. And the stream of books about biblical and theological perspectives is unending. I, for one, have probably read my last book providing a theological and biblical defense of same-sex relationships. Yes, there are some, e.g., Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships, by James V. Brownson. As one supportive friend expressed it, “This conversation ended for me several years ago.”

Usually I can ignore the clamor about LGBT persons at Christian colleges — I am out to a small circle of friends where I teach and have other close friends who support me. I walk into my classroom and remember how much I enjoy talking about ideas. And teaching permits me to read books and discuss them. But reading the two letters submitted to President Obama requesting a religious exemption reminded me how many think that my presence threatens the moral health of their institutions even though I am a co-religionist. If an out, gay professor at a Christian college were teaching the Krebs Cycle in Biology 101 or explaining the origins of World War I in History 370, does the content then suddenly become inaccurate? Or will s/he "have a gay agenda"?

Do some CCCU institutions think having out, gay, married faculty/staff would be interpreted as an official endorsement of same-sex marriage? I have colleagues who are divorced — does their presence mean the institution "endorses" divorce? No, it does not. I have married colleagues who have chosen not to have children. Does this mean the university "endorses" that choice? No, it does not. The university simply recognizes the freedom to decide for ourselves what is best and makes for fulfilled lives.

Some signers of these letters have not acquitted themselves well once negative reaction set in. President Lindsay of Gordon has now said he “never would have signed the letter if he had known it would become public.” So much for the courage of his convictions.

Friends at another CCCU institution told me that there was general confusion when the president, having signed the letter, insisted that his institution did not, in fact, discriminate against LGBT persons. This despite language in the faculty and student handbooks which has prevented out, gay, partnered faculty from being hired for decades.

One of the more disappointing statements was made by William Robinson, interim president of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, who stated, “The issue is not homosexuality. It’s religious freedom.” How can the issue not be homosexuality when faculty handbooks and institutional statements at CCCU institutions contain language that bars hiring gay people?

From Biola University’s Standard of Conduct for faculty: “members of the Biola community are not to engage in activities that Scripture forbids. Such activities include, but are not limited to, dishonesty, thievery, fornication, adultery, homosexual practice...."

From Bethel University’s “Covenant for Life Together”: “The Bible also identifies character qualities and actions that should not be present in the lives of believers. For example: destructive anger, malice, rage, sexual immorality, impurity, adultery, evil desires, greed, idolatry, slander, profanity, lying, homosexual behavior, drunkenness, thievery, and dishonesty.”

“The issue is not homosexuality. It’s religious freedom.” Please.

But for the issue of homosexuality, letters requesting a religious exemption from the president’s executive order would never have been written. Robinson’s statement is sadly reminiscent of language used by Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University, in a 2000 interview with Larry King on CNN. Jones responded this way to a question about the university’s ban on interracial dating: “Well, being a Bible believing institution, Larry, we try to base things on Bible principle [sic]. The problem we have today is that our principle is so greatly misunderstood. People think we don't let them date because we are racist, in other words to be racist you have to treat people differently. We don't. We don't let them date, because we were trying, as an example, to enforce something, a principle that is much greater than this. We stand against the one-world government.... The Bible is very clear about this.... There is a religious freedom issue, that's all we ever fought for.”

CCCU presidents who signed a letter to Obama to ensure religious freedom should encourage their respective institutions to make truth-in-advertising a hallmark of information for prospective students. I would suggest the following statement:

If you are a student who is wrestling with your sexual and/or gender identity, then [name of institution] is probably not the place for you. It is not that we don’t recognize the reality of your struggle (in fact, we have a student organization where you can find support — depending on the institutional policy), but our religious liberty comes first. If you are gay and do enroll, you should know that the moment you graduate your status changes. Should you find someone to love and share life with and marry, we will not hire you.

A member of the Gordon College community wrote an eloquent essay on the controversy titled, “How long O Lord?” posted at an anonymous blog for members of the Gordon community “who want to share their thoughts yet don’t feel they can.” The author identifies himself/herself as “Anonymous Staff/Professor” and writes:

“How long O Lord? Scripture often uses this phrase as a sign of lament.... For my community at Gordon I ask, How long O Lord?.... How long until we have real conversation about the image of God and the possibility that maybe we’ve been interpreting scripture wrong on this issue for centuries? .... How long O Lord till we repent for dividing your community? I pray that it will not be too late when we do. This I lament.”

Amen and amen.

The author is a faculty member at a Christian college where publishing this piece with the author's name would result in dismissal.